Proposed changes to the UK's immigration system could lead to more IT jobs being offshored, industry experts have warned.
Despite a well-documented domestic IT skills shortage — and projections of increasing demand for techies and telecoms workers over the coming years — IT staff have not been included on a draft list of 'shortages occupations' drawn up by the Home Office's Migration Advisory Committee (MAC).
Science and maths teachers, civil engineers and even ballet dancers do make the grade but IT workers are not considered to be in short supply in the UK, according to the MAC's report.
The new system, modelled on a similar scheme in Australia, will be points based, with shortage-list workers needing fewer points to be allowed to work in the UK.
A Home Office spokesman told ZDNet.co.uk's sister site, silicon.com: "The MAC's data analysis showed that IT workers were not necessarily in shortage here. They also took evidence from the sector advisory panel… and they advised that IT professions weren't included."
He added: "The MAC… has a pretty robust methodology. The first of its sort. And this is what it concluded."
In its report, the MAC said it heard evidence on the following IT jobs: information and communication technology managers; IT strategy and planning professionals; and software professionals, but it did not find "strong evidence of shortages" in any of the roles.
But Paul Smith, global managing director of outsourcing at recruitment company Harvey Nash, told silicon.com the MAC's conclusion there is no UK IT skills shortage is "laughable".
He said: "It's a bit like the government moving everybody off the roads with the carbon and congestion charging policy and taxes and moving them onto the trains without having a public transport system. The same thing's happening in IT where we currently have a massive skills shortage in IT — and it is massive, there's 160,000 jobs unfilled in the IT space right now — and they're saying we don't have a shortage."
Smith added: "If [chief information officers] can't find the skills in the UK, they clearly have to look to see if they can bring people in from outside of the UK to backfill their skills. If suddenly they're not able to do that because it's not a government priority then what are they going to do? The answer is they're going to go and develop elsewhere.
"They're going to move their central IT department out of the UK to other locations. They're going to start moving their IT resources offshore. Many of them are doing that at the moment but this will just compound the challenge."
Matthew Poyiadgi, IT trade association CompTIA's European VP, added that barriers to skilled techies working in the UK could reduce the competitiveness of UK Plc.
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He warned: "Reducing the number of talented people coming into the UK also reduces competition for jobs. Reduced competition will quickly result in an employer's market where businesses no longer need to fight for the best people. The pressure to offer competitive wages will drop and the UK will become a less attractive proposition for all strong IT candidates, be they from the UK, the EU or further afield.
"Long term this can only result in one effect: the gradual movement of all IT talent from the UK to countries that offer better salaries and better employment opportunities. The bottom line is that we need to remain an open market for talented technology candidates or we risk eroding the growing pool of skilled individuals we already have."
Harvey Nash's Smith added: "There's still time for them to reconsider this. This [MAC] report needs to come back on itself and actually take some real input from the IT industry about the real challenges in the recruitment industry… and what the implications are of their actions. Things are much more far reaching for the economy… than they have possibly realised in their machinations."
However, Marilyn Davidson, a director at Association of Technology Staffing Companies (ATSCo), does not believe the MAC's omission of IT will have a big impact on how many migrant tech workers come to the UK.
She said: "I don't think it'll have a big impact. We haven't had any IT workers on the shortage of occupations list for years… so I don't think it's really going to make a great deal of difference.
"The main area where IT workers come in from non-EU countries is from India and most of those come in on intracompany transfers and that's not affected, so I still think we're going to get quite an influx of people from India coming in on intracompany transfers."
For skills not on the shortage occupations list, the MAC report recommends sectors should "develop training strategies and look beyond migration for new recruits". However growing IT skills at home may prove challenging in the face of declining numbers of science and IT students, according to Harvey Nash's Smith. "Government and education have become so arts based that we are just not encouraging our children into the science subjects," he said.
UK IT sector skills body, e-skills UK, declined to comment for this article.
Talkback
As has been commented countless times before by myself and many others, there is plenty of native IT talent in this country, but the current ultra-low-cost no-humans-involved trend in IT recruitment practice is simply not matching people to jobs. In fact it's not really interested in people at all.
A decade or so ago, employers acknowledged that there is a real skill in finding good people and they paid the price. In return they found people that fitted their teams (first priority) and were close enough to the "perfect" knowledge profile to be up and running in a month or two.
The IT industry represents a particular problem for recruitment as there are a dazzling array of products that roll versions with monotonous regularity. The likelihood of finding someone who has recent relevant experience of your particular basket of products at your particular array of versions, who also fits in with your team is vanishingly small. None the less, the HR departments and recruitment agencies are still banging on trying to do this; and then bleating about IT skills shortages when they fail.
Here's a message to them all. Stop trying to recruit software operators and start recruiting people. It may cost a little more in the short term, but longer term you will get what you want and you won't have to keep repeating the process when the misfits you do eventually get, by the current process, inevitably crash and burn.
There is no skills shortage, but the employers just look in the wrong place and the agencies are mostly next to useless so there is an ongoing blind leading the blind situation.
The arguments put forward seem to suggest that the value in allowing cheaper labour into the market is to push up job competition which will then raise salaries so stopping the influx of migrant workers will lead to lower salaries and all the intelligent IT workers leaving the country.
Nope, doesn't make sense to me but then again I do logic puzzles so might not be thinking laterally enough.
The way this country is going, rest assured that the salary itself will probably be the last factor considered.
Excellent and accurate comment from my observations.
Mr.Poyiadgi says that reduced competition for IT jobs would result in lower wages. But according to the basic rule of supply and demand just the opposite would be the case: IT wages would rise. Of course all this is a non-issue because UK universities are filled with indian IT students (no offense, but fact), intracompany transfers are not affected and offshoring carries on regardless.